Benj’s blog!

… and indeed it is. So much for trying to keep the blog up-to-date. The fall semester started at the end of August and I’ve been fairly busy since.

Anyway, in case you were wondering, all is well here in Ithaca.

To keep you occupied, here’s a few pictures I took over the weekend. I’ll see about writing more some time. Honestly.

I spent the past weekend in Vermont with Sam (my good friend visiting from England) and Angela (who was there for work). The drive took about 6 hours and was fairly uneventful, passing through NY state and directly into Vermont. So far I’ve noticed that the geography of each of the states are noticeably different. For example PA seems less hilly than NY, which in turn is less hilly than VT. Differences are also apparent in the flora.

We stayed by Lake Morey in the Connecticut river valley. The picture up and left is the view from a 2000ft hill Sam and I canoed to and then climbed and features the aforementioned river. On another adventure, Sam spotted this little thing, which I believe is a salamander, scurrying around. I guess the fauna differs too.

All in all it was a great weekend. And now it’s time to get back to working on my paper.

Unless you count Syracuse, until Tuesday, I had only been to two large US cities — Boston and NYC. With this in mind, and since I hadn’t really had much of a break over summer, I decided to accompany Angela on a short trip to Chicago.

We set of on Monday night, with the intention of flying out of Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport (ITH) (also a first for me) to Philadelphia (PHL) and onto Chicago (ORD), but the weather had made other plans for us. On arrival at the airport it was clear something was afoot, people were milling around and generally looking miserable and the queues for check-in were short, we were second or third in line.

On stepping forward, we were told that the had just been cancelled due to thunderstorms (it was a beautiful evening in Ithaca). On top of that, tomorrow morning’s flight to Philadelphia was full, so we were kind of stuck. The only flight leaving Ithaca that night was going to NY - La Guardia (LGA), but we were told that by the time we would arrive, there were no flights on to Chicago. Thinking we could make an adventure out of it, we chose to go to LGA and travel to ORD at 6am the following morning.

Continue Reading »

Imagine the scene, early 1990s in the Learning Resource Centre (a fancy name for a library with some computers). It’s around 4pm and school had finished for the day. I was messing around and somehow got my floppy disk stuck in the drive of an Archimedes A310 (or 320?). I was a bit panicked and thought, as children tend to do, that I would get in trouble. Thankfully Steve (who I’d known since infants school) and Joe came to my aid with some tweezers(!), and we’ve been friends ever since.

It was Joe who first taught me how to program on those Acorns, I remember he recommended some arcane book on WIMP programming and I dabbled a bit. He stuck with the Acorn stuff and I moved over to PCs (Windows 3.1 was all the rage back then). Eventually he saw the light and moved to PC, and now we’re both Mac users?

Anyway, it seems Joe was inspired my the resurrection of my blog and decided to get his own blog on the go. Go and have a look.

August 6th 2006, I flew out of England and arrived at JFK.  From JFK I took a flight to Syracuse, where I was greeted by my new landlord.  He had offered to give me a ride to Ithaca, NY, the place I now call home. A few days later, my girlfriend Lala arrived with her life in suitcases.  We spent a few weeks getting to know the area, and then it was time for school year to start.

Continue Reading »

It’s now sitting safely on the drive and seems to run OK. I took a picture of it on the transporter, will maybe upload that later on! The repairers have replaced about 15 items, including the wheel, passenger door shell and shock absorber. Ironically, when I took it out for a test drive I got stuck in 2 traffic jams — I now know that the CD player works!

Following on from BANG! …

Well, it turns out the guy was NOT insured to be driving his mum’s car and as a result there is no insurance company to claim against. It’s actually illegal to drive without insurance in the UK so I could press charges, but I think the other driver has been reasonable and honest in accepting the blame and agreeing to pay out of his own pocket. In addition, he’s off to University and so I think he has other things to worry about!

The only unfortunate thing is that I don’t get a courtesy car now unless I want to pay and try to charge him for it, hardly worth the effort and hassle, I’m sure I can cope without my car for a few weeks.

That’s what it sounds like when someone crashes into the side of your car — I know that because that’s what happened to me this afternoon. Slowly and cautiously as ever, I drove into Sainsbury’s car park in Castle Retail Park and some young guy went through a give-way junction and BANG!

I sat for a while and gave him and evil look through the window before getting out; at first, whilst the cars were still connected it looked not so bad, I didn’t notice any damage. I asked him to reverse his car and then I saw my the front off-side wheel at a 30degree angle to the normal. My immediate thought was “Damn, this looks expensive!”

After exchanging details with the other driver, I spoke with my insurance company who processed the claim over the phone and sent someone to tow away the car (thanks to Sainsbury’s for letting me use the phone).

I emptied the car, put all my stuff in to bags and waited for the tow guy to appear, which he did within about 20 minutes. He laughed when he saw the damage, if there was a way to inflict maximum damage without blowing up the car and damaging as few panels as possible, this was it! From 3 sides the car looked fine, from the “passenger side” it looks pretty bad!

Safe in the knowledge my car was in good hands, I handed over the key and set off on the 3-mile walk home along the canal with bags in hand. Good job it was a pleasant afternoon. Assuming he keeps to his word and accepts the responsibility I should have a courtesy car to drive within a few days and no repair bill to pay nor should it affect my insurance excess.

Moral of the story? Call in at the petrol station first and drive in to the car park the back way.

It’s generally accepted that Apple will release new desktop machines tomorrow.

DON’T DO IT! SAVE YOUR MONEY!

(Well, I have to try and restrain myself somehow, the credit-card is practically screaming to me “buy something, buy something!” )

Thursdays are great. I don’t get up until 8am and spend the day pottering around doing little odd jobs here and there. Aren’t you jealous?

Anyway, I needed to make a list of books I have to read, finish reading or to order and then read:

• Manufacturing Consent. Chomskey & Herman
• The Story of B. Daniel Quinn
• The Road to Serfdom. Hayek
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beecher Stowe.
• Straight Shooting. Silber
• Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond
• Bringing Down the House. Mezrich
• Understanding Power - Indispensable Chomsky. Chomsky + Eds.

Ok. Finished Chomsky. Some kind of “review” is here.

For once I haven’t been slacking! Done a number of things this today that I’ve been meaning to get out of the way for ages. More on those later perhaps!

For now I’ll leave you with this lovely image and the familiar phrase, new toy. Honestly, my car is in that picture …

OK so the Ferrari actually belongs to “someone” who “works” for the Ferrari F1 team, who was at the wedding where I played guitar on Saturday. I can dream though :).

According to Guardian Unlimited | Life | The Essential Difference front page I have an “Extreme Type S” brain, with empathising quotient (EQ) 32 and systemising quotient (SQ) 50. That makes me fairly male!

Interesting, eh?

I haven’t been doing a great deal over the past few weeks. Well, that’s not strictly true, mainly I’ve been thinking about what I will do “next year”. My teaching contract finishes in July and I would like some firm plans for what to do then. More about that later.

I’m reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, a great book by a great author. I prefer TF over Atlas Shrugged although both of these are a must read! Open to suggestions as to what to read next - any great piece of fiction or something that will really makes you think, drop me a suggestion :).

Oh, isn’t this WAR-TV thing getting rather tiresome? The embedded reporting was an interesting concept but ultimately we’re still only seeing what the reporters are permitted to broadcast. I’ve often thought each of these broadcasters has their own agenda (compare BBC with C4 news to see what I mean) which massively influences the content and the emphasis. I guess the “truth ISN’T out there .. !”.

Later :).

test

After visiting Mark on Thursday, I decided to buy myself a new monitor. I went to buy the Apple 20″ Cinema Display from Jigsaw systems in Nottingham. Unfortunately the monitor was faulty and didn’t work correctly with my powerbook. I took it back for a refund, which finally appeared in my account today. ( 1 day for the money to come out … 3 for it to come back … !!)

I picked up another display from the AppleStore in Nottingham (this time after careful inspection in the shop). The first display was faulty, the 2nd was fine. When I say “fine”, I mean amazing!
So I’m now running my Powerbook as a “desktop” machine, running at the native resolution of 1680×1050. Sheer bliss !

BTW The display is also compatiable with my PC on the Radeon9700 (via the Apple ADC -> DVI convertor). Windows XP detected it and ran at the native resolution after a reboot, no problems !

Well I’ve spent around one third of my expected life on the planet now. I hope the next two thirds go as well !